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There's a lot of irrelevants in the circus

Daily Archives: April 13, 2018

This is not what it looks like outside. But a fella can pretend, right?

It’s Friday, and after a day of false spring here in Chicago, we seem destined for another spell of cold drear. But dammit, I enjoyed yesterday, and I’ll enjoy today, even if the sun is fleeting. What does today care for tomorrow’s Smarch?

Nothing, brother, that’s what. These are strange and terrible times, where every day brings some numbing horrors. But that makes taking the brief burst of spring when you can, and sine-waving your arms in the warming wind.

So dammit, let’s do some quick hits, and gird ourselves for the battles to come.

Patricia Lockwood on the troubles of writing now

Writing about politics in deeply political times is pretty easy. Writing about other things isn’t, because politics seeps into every nook of our brain. And it isn’t just politics: it’s the leering dumbface of our lowing idiot, and the carnival of horrors his cheap victory opened in town square.

It is omnipresent, amplified of course by our ever-present media, the supercomputers in our pockets, which even in the best of times (2015) was impossibly distracting. All of this makes it difficult to practice the serious slow thinking that serious writing deserves.

In an essay/lecture in TinHouse the poet Patricia Lockwood tackles this problem, capturing precisely the weird recursive anger that any thinking person has these days. She is asking, titularly, how do we write now? How can anyone really write in this moment?

It’s funny, angry, depressing, uplifting, and never saccharine. In the end, the advice is just to read things that slow you down, which I think we can all do. Here’s a good sample.

Read diaries, which make the day permanent. Read anything that slows you down to the pace of real life, like Zora Neale Hurston’s preservations of dialect that walk in dresses down dirt roads. Read one of those Annie Dillard books where she watches an ant fuck for like fourteen straight hours and at the end of it somehow believes in God even more than she did already.